What Actually Makes a Fashion Brand Sustainable

What Actually Makes a Fashion Brand Sustainable? The Problem With Judging a Garment by Its Materials

At Fashion Week recently, I watched designers present collections that engaged with sustainability in different ways. Some explored cultural sustainability; others focused on materials and sourcing. I also noticed fabrics that prompted questions about what we have come to expect sustainable fashion to look like.

In one conversation, someone questioned why a designer would choose a particular fabric if it wasn’t considered sustainable. I understood the question. Materials have real environmental consequences, and designers should be thoughtful about what they use. But I found myself thinking about how quickly we can move from questioning a material to judging an entire design, business or brand.

When did sustainability become something we think we can determine by looking at a garment?

A fabric can have environmental drawbacks and still serve a considered purpose within a design. A natural fibre isn’t automatically the best choice for every application, just as an upcycled garment isn’t automatically durable. The impact of a material depends on more than its name: how it is produced, how it performs, how long the product lasts, how it is cared for and what happens at the end of its useful life.

None of this means we should overlook environmental harm in the name of creativity or commercial practicality. It means we need to ask better questions.

Sustainability Doesn’t Have to Look Sustainable

When I worked on Kijani Ajabu, I sometimes used denim or polyester puffer fabric alongside smaller sections of hand-painted textiles. The less expensive materials helped bring down production costs, allowing me to use the hand-painted elements I wanted without making the entire garment prohibitively expensive.

Those decisions were part of how I approached the design, the business and the customer. I wanted to create something expressive while keeping it financially accessible. The point wasn’t that every material choice was environmentally ideal. It was that sustainability involves decisions that interact with one another, and those decisions have consequences beyond the fabric itself.

There is a difference between designing something that incorporates sustainable materials and building sustainability into the way a business operates. Sometimes the choices that matter most are not immediately visible. They might involve reducing waste during cutting, paying people fairly, making garments easier to repair, choosing suppliers carefully or designing products customers can afford to keep.

I can often recognise an upcycled garment by the material’s previous life: a tablecloth, bedspread, curtain or pair of khaki trousers transformed into something new. That creativity is exciting. But sustainability shouldn’t have to announce itself through the visible appearance of reclaimed materials. Nor should a garment need to look a particular way before we consider the decisions behind it.

The work can be visible or invisible. What matters is whether we understand what those decisions achieve, what trade-offs they involve and what evidence supports the claims being made.

The Material Has to Work for the Garment

I recently came across a social media video in which someone dismantled a Patagonia cap and questioned the materials used in its construction. It got me thinking about how we evaluate products. If we focus on individual ingredients without understanding the product’s intended use, construction and lifespan, we risk drawing conclusions before we have the full picture.

What performance does the product need to deliver? Does it hold its shape? Will the colour last? Can it withstand regular use and washing? Could an alternative material meet those needs with a lower overall impact? These are questions worth asking. The answers depend on the specific materials and how the product is made; we shouldn’t assume that a material is unsuitable simply because it is synthetic, or suitable simply because it is natural.

I think about this when I encounter paper grocery bags stapled shut so tightly that they tear when opened. A bag that cannot be reused easily may lose some of its practical value, even if the material seems like an environmentally preferable option. That doesn’t make paper universally worse than plastic. The environmental trade-offs depend on factors such as production, transport, reuse and disposal. But it does raise a useful design question: are we considering how a product will actually be used, or only how its materials look on paper?

Durability, usability and environmental impact need to be considered together. A product that fails quickly can create a different set of problems from one that lasts, but durability alone doesn’t erase the impacts of production. We need to understand the whole picture rather than searching for a single material that can stand in for sustainability.

What Happens When We Scale?

These questions become even more complicated when we move from an independent designer to a large retail collaboration.

An independent designer producing 30 to 100 pieces has different constraints from a designer creating a collection for a major retailer. A limited collection sold across 15 or 20 stores, in multiple sizes, may still require thousands of units. The designer and production team must consider consistent material availability, pricing, quality, lead times and the realities of manufacturing at that scale.

Those constraints do not excuse environmental harm. They do, however, change the practical questions we need to answer. A material that works beautifully for a small run might not be available in the quantities or price range required for a larger collection. A more responsible alternative may need different production planning, supplier relationships or lead times to become viable.

If our expectation is that every brand should make the same choices regardless of its size, resources, business model or customers, we risk creating standards that are difficult to implement without helping businesses understand how to improve.

The goal should not be to lower expectations. It should be to make the path towards better practice clearer, more rigorous and more achievable.

Why OneThread Has Ten Sustainability Pillars

When I began researching African fashion and sustainability six years ago, my first business plan for Kijani Ajabu described the brand as a case study for understanding the systems behind the industry. I spent roughly three years making individual pieces and learning how the business worked before releasing a collection. I wanted to understand the realities of building a fashion business, not just the finished product.

I kept hearing that sustainable fashion was primarily about materials and sourcing. But for early-stage African brands, specialist or certified materials can come with significant costs, sourcing challenges and minimum order requirements. Choosing them can put pressure on already tight margins. Passing those costs on to customers can make products inaccessible; absorbing them can make the business difficult to sustain.

Materials matter, but they cannot carry the entire burden of sustainability.

That is part of why we developed OneThread’s ten-pillar approach. We look at materials and sourcing alongside labour and production ethics, community engagement, customer-centred sustainability, environmental impact, innovation, circularity, transparency, cultural sustainability and Ubuntu-driven shared value.

A brand might have work to do on material sourcing while demonstrating strong community relationships. It might be creating innovative products but lack a reliable way to document its practices. It might have a compelling cultural story but need to strengthen how it obtains consent, gives credit or shares value. Those realities cannot be captured meaningfully by looking at a fabric label alone.

OneThread’s Sustainability Assessment is designed to help brands understand what they are already doing, what they can substantiate and where they may need stronger practices, documentation or systems. It is not a verdict on whether a brand is sustainable. It is a starting point for understanding the business more fully.

We Need Better Questions, Not Easier Answers

Sustainability requires scrutiny. Brands should be able to explain their material choices, understand their impacts and support the claims they make. But scrutiny should help us understand more, not encourage us to make sweeping judgments from a single detail.

Instead of asking only whether a fabric is sustainable, we can ask how it was sourced, how it performs, how much waste its production creates and how long the resulting garment is likely to be used. We can examine who made it, how they were paid, whether the business can maintain those practices and whether the product serves its customers well. We can also ask what the brand knows, what it doesn’t yet know and what it needs to document.

These questions are harder than checking a label. They are also more useful.

If you’re building a fashion brand, start by understanding the sustainability already present in your business — and where you have room to strengthen it.

Take the OneThread Sustainability Assessment to explore your business across all ten pillars, identify existing practices and evidence, and uncover areas where better documentation or stronger systems could support your next stage of growth.

You don’t need to have everything figured out before you begin. You need a clearer picture of where you are, so you can make more informed decisions about where to go next.

Sustainable by tradition. Provable by data.